Variable on query_posts isn't working

How are you defining $cat_name? What is the output of var_dump( $cat_name )?

Actually, I thought I defined $cat_name in the first line of the code: figured the string of $cat_name would now be the category name I gave it. Apparently that’s not true, the output of var_dump gives me ‘null’.

I initially wrote this code with a post_id instead of category_name, but I’m making this for someone who needs to be able to make changes. Therefore, I need category_name rather than post_id. With post_id it worked like this, no errors whatsoever:

<?php
	$postid = 33;
	$content = get_post_field('post_content', $postid);
	$content = explode('|', $content);
		foreach ($content as &$zoekenNaar)	{
		$zoekenNaar = explode(':',$zoekenNaar);
			echo '<pre>';
			print_r($zoekenNaar);
			echo '</pre>';
		}
?>

I have tried just changing it like that, adding $category_name = 'zoekennaar', but it doesn’t work.

(I’ve added brackets to the foreach loop as you can see, forget that in the first place, and added print_r $zoekenNaar instead of $content now, which is what should be happening).

ADDED:

I created a new post to see what would happen. My code as it is now shows the most recent post, so $cat_name indeed doesn’t work. Figured most of you already know, but I’m not the only newbie so it might be useful for someone ??

As you’ve seen, you need to pass a post ID as the second argument to get_post_field() and nothing else will work.

One way to get the IDs would be to use get_posts():

<?php $posts = get_posts( array( 'category_name' => $cat_name ) ); ?>

$posts would then be an array of objects and you could iterate over the array to get the post content.

What exactly are you trying to do?

Thank you so much for the quick responds and help!

The get_posts you send, is that a line of code I put in instead of these lines?

query_posts('category_name=zoekennaar' . $cat_name);
$content = get_post_field('post_content', $cat_name);

To be honest, I don’t have much an idea of what I’m doing. I’m totally new to this and someone explained this to me, so I thought I’d give it a shot.

First of, my website needs to be editable by my boss, without her having to dig into PHP files.

I’m basically trying to generate a list from a post. This list offers the users four options. The user can click one of those options, and another list of options will apear.

Every list is a new post with a new category name. As said above, my boss needs to be able to add to or take things away from the list, without having to go into php.

Yeah. You’d have to define $cat_name beforehand, probably by whatever method you were using before. You’d then use something like foreach() to iterate over the array of posts returned by get_posts():

<?php
  $posts = get_posts( array( 'category_name' => $cat_name ) );
  foreach( $posts as $post ) {
    $content = get_post_field( 'post_content', $post->ID );
    $content = explode( '|', $content );
    foreach ( $content as &$zoekenNaar ) {
      $zoekenNaar = explode( ':', $zoekenNaar);
      echo '<pre>';
      print_r( $zoekenNaar );
      echo '</pre>';
    }
  }
?>

I copypasted your code and then decided to replace $cat_name with the actual category_name, and that worked. This is exactly what I was trying to do in the first place, so thanks! ??